


Saturnalia

by foux_dogue



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Crimson Flower Route, Drunk Sex, M/M, Not-so-reluctant traveler Linhardt, Or: how to move on after the end of the world, Oral Sex, Plot With Porn, Post-War, Recovery, Reluctant bodyguard Felix, Remorse, Repressed hurt/comfort, Sober Sex, referenced character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-12
Updated: 2020-08-03
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:47:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 15,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25228558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foux_dogue/pseuds/foux_dogue
Summary: Escorting Linhardt to the newly built Imperial Crest Institute isn’t the greatest sacrifice Felix has ever made for Adrestia, but it might be the most insufferable. Not that Linhardt would ever submit himself to anything that could be described asinsufferable— or evenunpleasant, frankly. In fact, Fodlan’s preeminent Crest scholar has made it a point to endure nothing but pleasant things after the war’s end.It becomes a point of contention.Come to think of it, Linhardt’s never really been one forcontention, either.
Relationships: Felix Hugo Fraldarius/Linhardt von Hevring
Comments: 42
Kudos: 116





	1. On the Road

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: Brief description of a panic attack in section seven.

Some people would call Felix a traitor. Those people are dead, but that doesn’t change what they’d say about him. Sometimes it even keeps him up at night, although he’ll never admit that to anybody. Then again, who in the hell would listen? It’s not like turning his coat had earned him many new friends. That hadn’t been why he’d done it, of course, but that doesn’t change what’d happened.

Not to say that he regrets everything he’s done. He’s glad he didn’t die for a madman. He’s glad he didn’t die for his father, either, to be completely honest. He’s glad that some priest devoted to a goddess he doesn’t believe in didn’t eulogize him as a brave knight and a dutiful son. He’s even glad that he bet his chips on the right master after Dimitri lost his right to the title. Edelgard’s as good an emperor as anyone else who calls themselves something like that, as far as he’s concerned.

But it keeps him up at night. Nightmares, ghosts, bloody swords. None of that has done any favors for Felix’s complexion. He’s come to terms with the fact that he’s lost what little charm he’d had as a younger man. Once he’d been pale, for instance, and in a way that some people called _aristocratic_ , whatever the hell that means. Now he’s sallow. Even in the middle of the night he’s got dark rings under his eyes. Seven years since the end of the war and all of his muscles have dried into gristle, like some mangy cur snapping up scraps in the streets. His hair looks like shit. He’s started to drink too much. So much for heroes.

“Lord Fraldarius?”

That’s another farce. He’s not a lord of anything. Not that he’d ever dreamed of dukedom, but that ship’s long sailed and gone. They called him _general_ during the war, but they aren’t at war anymore. Maybe they won’t be again until long after he’s finally dead. But he’d been exceptional at killing people for the emperor, and so in return the Imperial coffers always somehow seem to pay his tabs, and people keep calling him lord. There you go. The spoils of war.

“Lord Fraldarius?”

“Yeah,” he snaps, his voice too hoarse to carry very far. He grinds his knuckles into the sockets of his eyes and takes his time to knot back his long, scraggly hair. “Yeah, what?”

“A message for you, my lord.”

A message. Felix scoffs and stands from his desk to scuff his boots across the floor. He never gets any messages. Who would send them? Sylvain used to. Ingrid, too. _How are you_ , that sort of thing: _you wouldn’t believe what Father’s done now. Lady’s had a pretty new filly. Do you think I can name her Lady, too?_

_Sreng’s getting bold again._

_Bad harvests. Can Fraldarius spare any grain? Galatea would be happy for soldiers, too._

_I wish you’d answer my letters. Just want to know you’re alive._

_Felix,_ in Ingrid’s neat hand, shaky where it’d always been so smooth: _what did you do?_

He yanks open the door. A boy in a tidy scarlet jacket stares back at him, startled. The boy then bows and offers up a letter with the smooth extension of his elbows. Felix eyes the red wax stamped in the letter’s middle, as bloody and foreboding as all of the red that’s everywhere else. He takes the letter. No doubt the boy won’t leave otherwise.

“Minister Vestra—”

Felix raises a hand to silence the boy before he can finish the sentence. There is little in this world he cares less about than the fancies of one Minister Vestra.

“Thank you,” Felix says, because it’s not like it’s the boy’s fault, and then he slams the door. The boy gasps in surprise. That makes him feel a little shitty. He sighs and tosses the letter onto the nearby desk before opening the door again. This time he shoves a few gold coins at the boy’s chest before he swings it shut.

“Thank you, my lord!” the boy echoes, voice muffled and pitched.

“Yeah,” Felix mumbles. Not like the kid can hear him. He shuffles back across the room — not his room, by the way, just another shitty rented bed stuffed above an equally shitty tavern, because what in the hell is he going to do with a house, with land, with a staff? He can barely stand the buck-toothed maid who changes his sheets, and he doesn’t even know her name.

The letter stops him in his tracks halfway to the unmade bed. It’s like a cobra staring him down. Knowing Hubert, he wouldn’t be surprised if it’s just as venomous, too. He sighs and slumps towards the desk again, because after you live through a war you learn about what you can run from, and what you can’t.

The wax breaks into crumbs across the desktop. The paper’s nice: thick, cream-colored, soft to the touch. Hubert’s long, sloping hand covers half the page. Felix is surprised it doesn’t smell like sulphur or brimstone or whatever the hell else a man like Hubert carries around in sachets strung around his neck.

 _Lord Felix Hugo Fraldarius, O.M.E:_

_O.M.E_. Order Most Excellent, apparently. Order of Miserable Executioners, more like. Felix huffs a long breath through his nose and unfolds the last third of the letter with the arch of his palm.

 _I hope that this message finds you well_ , Hubert’s quill fibs. _Her Majesty the Emperor bids you her good tidings, and has expressed to me her wish that you are finding the springtime weather pleasant._ Pleasant. Sure. That’s one way to put the particular torture of wearing leathers under Adrestia’s impervious sun. Felix skims the next few lines, his eyes blurring until they settle on _Minister Linhardt von Hevring_.

He cocks a brow at the name. _Linhardt_. He’d nearly forgotten about Linhardt. It’s a funny thing to do with a man who’d once so often saved his life, but then again, it’s not like Felix had been a special case. War. That old thing again. He backtracks through the letter until he finds: _and with the completion of construction, Minister Hevring now requires an escort to the Institute posthaste_. Good for Linhardt, Felix thinks dryly, until he skips a few more lines and spots a number with a shocking number of zeros at the end.

 _We expect the sum to be suitable_ , Hubert writes. Felix is suddenly so angry he’s surprised the paper doesn’t catch fire in his fist. They’ll never learn, will they? That he isn’t someone to be bought?

He crumples the letter into a tight, bitter ball and tosses it into a corner. Then he slumps low enough that the base of his skull fits against the chair back. The ceiling is grey from too many years spent guarding pipe smokers from the rain. Everything is grey in Enbarr. Marble, steel, silver, glass, silk. Grey and red. Sometimes he misses Fraldarius evergreen.

No he doesn’t.

It doesn’t matter.

They’re still there, that is. Those old stubborn trees. It doesn’t matter that where they’re rooted isn’t a duchy anymore. It doesn’t matter that he’ll be the last damned man to carry that cursed ten-letter name, either. And it doesn’t matter if he doesn’t want any more money, as it so happens, because he needs it just as much as he needs that fucking surname. _Lord Fraldarius_ gets him a bed when the inn’s full, after all, but only because Edelgard pays for it. Or, well, Hubert, most likely, menacing nanny that he is.

 _Fuck_.

Felix glances over at the paper chestnut that was once that stupid letter and, maybe before that, some sort of tree. He shuts his eyes and tries to remember what pine smells like. Apparently, in a stroke of pure impracticality, they’d built Linhardt’s Imperial Crestology Institute in Kleiman. He wishes he could ask Dedue what grows there. No, that’s a stupid thought. It’s not like that old phantom would ever tell him the truth. _Gallows_ is probably what Dedue would promise him if he could speak to him from wherever he’s buried, and it’s not like Felix doesn’t deserve them.

Still. It’s not like traipsing with Linhardt von Hevring across the Fodlanese countryside sounds much better. Damn. He needs a drink.

* * *

“Fly,” Felix orders Linhardt four days later over a mutually untouched lunch. Linhardt looks back at him as if he’s just suggested that he begin flapping his arms. “Wyverns,” Felix clarifies dryly. Linhardt’s lips turn into a little sour shape that he supposes is supposed to be a frown. 

“Well, that sounds dreadful,” Linhardt says. “Have you ever traveled any distance by wyvern-back? No, of course you haven’t. I remember how you were with horses, Lord Fraldarius.” He says the title like he knows it’s the punchline to some dark joke. Fucking Linhardt. Felix forgot how keen he is. “Let me assure you that flight does not promise a pleasant journey. Besides, I have a laboratory to carry with me, and although it is less prone to nausea, it is nearly as fragile as its master.”

“So send it ahead by coach,” Felix insists. “And soon. It’ll take a fortnight, and more if there’s rain.”

“Let’s hope not,” Linhardt scoffs. “I can smell you well enough from across the table. Forgive me if I’m not so eager to share a coach amidst a downpour.”

Felix takes a swig of ale at this newest affront. It doesn’t matter if its true or not: at one point both of them had been taught good manners. Not very noble to tell his lunch mate that he stinks. In any case, it’s not Felix’s fault that the war treated Linhardt better than him. The man looks virtually unchanged from their time at the monastery, if not for the ridiculous length of his hair and the round-lensed spectacles that he’s balanced on the bridge of his nose with enough lazy pomp that Felix is absolutely certain they’re only there for show. He nearly looks as pretty as the serving girls with their frilled skills and bouncing ringlets, except for the fact that his shirt is irreparably wrinkled, and his gloves are mismatched. One is ivory, one is cream. It doesn’t seem as though he’s noticed, or perhaps he simply doesn’t care.

“We should go by wyvern,” Felix says again. Linhardt rolls his eyes.

“I’ve rented a car,” he sniffs. “Can you play coachman? It only requires two horses.”

“Do I look like a coachman?” Felix snarls. Linhardt stares back at him, unmoved. _Gods fucking dammit_. Felix takes another drink. “No. Hire a driver. What the hell do you think you’ve paid me for?”

“Well, I’m not quite certain,” Linhardt concedes with a sigh, “but I’ve spent every penny on more important things than unwashed men meant to sit on a bench and whip horses. You’ll be a natural, Felix. I look forward to working with you.”

“No,” Felix growls. For some reason Linhardt smiles. He looks like a cat in a sunbeam with a fat rat in its claws.

“You haven’t changed at all,” Linhardt purrs. “It’s fascinating.”

Felix buries his nose in his yeasty tankard of ale and swallows his doubt. No, maybe it’s dread. Whatever it is, it’s not nearly strong enough for what’s ahead.

* * *

“Sit inside,” Felix grumbles as soon as Linhardt lifts the curtain blocking the bed from the bench at the head of the cart. Turns out _carriage_ was a generous term. It’s more like a glorified wagon, this disaster Linhardt purchased from gods’ know whom or where. What’s certain is that the peddlers were criminals for what they’d done. Linhardt had stuffed the bed of the cart with boxes and pillows for himself, but that hadn’t done a damn thing for the creaking board on which Felix has been bruising his ass for hours, and that says nothing for the skinny nags at the fore for whom he’s now responsible. 

“You can’t blame a man for wanting some fresh air,” Linhardt counters haughtily. He brushes back the tails of his robes and settles neatly beside Felix on the bench. There are plenty of things Felix can blame him for, and quite frankly he isn’t convinced that Linhardt doesn’t have something to do with the air, which is miserable and anything but _fresh_ , like always: humid and hot even though the sun’s just started to peek up from the horizon line. _You can’t possibly mean to leave now_ , Linhardt had protested hours earlier, bleary eyed from some twilight study and yet to have retreated to bed for the night. _I’m leaving_ , Felix had answered, which had really meant _I don’t give a fuck if I leave you behind_.

“A lovely morning,” Linhardt continues. He yawns and nudges his glasses up the bridge of his nose with the press of his middle finger. They slide back down to where they started, although it doesn’t seem to bother him.

“Hm,” says Felix.

“I see you’ve washed your hair,” Linhardt adds. “How delightful.”

If Enbarr wasn’t so sweltering all of the time Felix would have hidden his still-damp hair in his hood, but of course it’s no better than Aillel down here, and so he has no hood to speak of, just a linen shirt and a leather jerkin unlaced down the middle in the futile hopes of not sweating through everything he’s wearing by noontime. He never would’ve dressed like this during the war. It would’ve taken twenty paces for some lucky archer to shoot him in the heart. Now he doesn’t have much to worry about other than horseflies, and the occasional traveling merchant, and Linhardt, of course. Still, he was hired to protect Linhardt, although he can’t possibly fathom _why_ , so he’s got his sword propped against his knee and leather gloves with bits of metal in the knuckles for when he has to beat back... errant jugglers and peasants, he supposes.

For some unspeakable reason Linhardt distracts him from his musing by leaning sideways to stick his weasely nose into his hair.

“What the _fuck_ are you doing?” Felix snaps. He yanks back his arms with the question, tugging the reins by accident and earning himself an annoyed whinny from the mare most closely attached.

“For a man of your position, you use terrible soap,” Linhardt snips.

“What?”

“You smell like tallow,” Linhardt replies. He sounds nearly upset, for some godsforsaken reason. “Find yourself too close to a candle and I do imagine you’ll catch fire.”

Felix doesn’t honor that with a response. This doesn’t seem to dissuade his unwelcome companion.

“I remember that you used to be partial to sandalwood.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I thought it was very strange, a man like you bothering with something like that. Most soldiers they brought me smelled like mud and other unmentionables, but not you.”

Oh. The war. Maybe it was naive to think they could make it outside of Enbarr before that old bitch reared her head.

“Listen,” Felix chews through his barred teeth, “if we’re going to survive this trip there’s a few things we need to agree on. One,” he adds, wagging a finger at Linhardt for emphasis, “no talk about the godsdamned _war_. Two: do as I say and when I say it, because it’ll be for a good reason.” Another finger joins the first. Linhardt watches it behind his spectacles, bemused. “Three: I’m not cooking your meals. I’m not your damned keeper.”

“I believe you _are_ my keeper,” Linhardt corrects him primly.

“Not like that,” Felix snaps. Linhardt laughs and shakes his head.

“Very well,” he sighs. He tucks his hair behind his ears and crosses his arms, settling into a slumped shape as he watches the countryside pass them by. “But you’re welcome to my toiletries. I have plenty to share. A fortnight is a long time for tallow, Lord Fraldarius.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“What? Your _name_? Whatever would you prefer?”

“Nothing,” Felix assures him. “There’s only two of us. I’ll know damn well when you want me.”

“I see,” Linhardt drawls. Somehow he makes it sound obscene. Felix longs for a hood again and grips tighter on the reins.

“Be quiet,” he grumbles. Linhardt laughs.

It’s going to be a long fucking trip.

* * *

“Why _Kleiman_?”

They’ve made it to the first inn on the itinerary by the time Felix’s patience runs dry. Linhardt ignores the question for a moment, too distracted by his task of dissecting a boiled potato into smaller parts. Felix hadn’t wanted to share dinner with him, but it’d seemed impossible to avoid. In any case, they make strange enough fellows — Linhardt in his long robes and longer hair just barely captured by a lazy, fraying bun, and Felix in sweat-stained leathers and a scowl that could curdle milk — that the rest of the room has ignored them, at least.

“Why ever not?” Linhardt finally answers, nibbling on his fork once he’s finished with the question.

“What the hell’s in Kleiman?”

Felix can’t think of much besides burnt earth and cursed graveyards.

“Kleiman has long been home to scholarly study and innovation,” Linhardt says. A drip of gravy escapes down the side of his thumb. He sucks it off slowly, methodically. Felix’s starting to think he’s doing this shit on purpose. “Far before Fodlan ever bothered with it, at least. Don’t tell me you think they burned Duscur because of the _Blaiddyds_.”

The name twists a dagger in Felix’s gut. He stabs the prongs of his fork through the quartered rabbit on his plate in revenge.

“The wonders we lost when Targoviste fell...But surely you know better than I. Did you truly never speak of it with that Duscurian classmate of yours?”

Felix extends a finger at him. Rule number one. This time it’s his middle finger instead of the pointer it’d been before, but Linhardt seems to understand. He flutters his eyelashes in defeat.

“And it’s very far from Enbarr,” he continues, this time slyly. Felix scoffs.

“Clearly.” 

“You aren’t the only one for whom Minister Vestra’s charms have grown thin,” Linhardt explains.

“I don’t give a damn about Vestra.”

“Lucky for you. He’s always had the habit of making my life terribly difficult. But perhaps distance shall make us grow fonder.”

“Eat your dinner,” Felix gripes. He chews darkly at his own mouthful for good measure.

“Goodness,” Linhardt replies, “what a keeper you are.”

Felix swallows and stands and snatches his tankard, sloshing ale onto his sleeve.

“We leave at dawn,” he tells him sourly. “Try not to get your throat slit.”

“Perhaps I’ll make new friends,” Linhardt calls after him as Felix retreats towards the rented rooms upstairs. He has to push his way through ruddy faced drunks and fieldhands still smeared with dirt. It’s all a joke. There’d been a time when inns had been nearly as dangerous as battlefields. Now everyone’s... _happy_. Even the cutthroats have turned to shoemaking and planting radishes to make ends meet. What the hell is he doing there, he can’t help but wonder as he shuts himself into his room and finishes off his drink: where in the hell does a man like him belong in a world like this?

* * *

“Rain today?”

Linhardt yawns the question as he crawls onto the bench from the shrouded den of the cart bed. Felix sighs. The man had been nearly impossible to chase from the inn that morning onto the cart. He’d really hoped that he’d sleep through the day, for once as tolerable as his silent crates. No such luck, apparently.

“Yes,” Felix grits out.

“It’s rather nice,” Linhardt observes as he settles himself into his seat. “Makes the vegetation smell so lovely and green.”

“Won’t be lovely if we get stuck in the mud,” Felix grumbles, although that isn’t likely. The rain hasn’t been much more than a drizzle since the dawn, and the road ahead is still hard-baked from the sun. All the weather’s done is irritate the horses and make his bones ache. He drops the reins to his lap and pulls off his gloves at the idea. Futilely, he massages the throb between his knuckles. Linhardt watches him do it. His gaze is unsettling, Felix had discovered on day two of their journey. It isn’t any better on day six.

“What are you doing?” Felix predicts just a half moment before Linhardt reaches towards him. “Let go of me,” he adds when Linhardt’s gloved fingers brush the top of his right hand.

“Do you think I’m going to bite you?” Linhardt teases. “It’s the thoron, you know. No one can cast it long before it starts to bother them.”

“I don’t have anything to do with thoron,” Felix growls. Linhardt rolls his eyes.

“Not to break any of your rules,” he sniffs, “but I do have a memory beyond yesterday, and even the day before. How fine it would be if I didn’t, and yet so it goes. You were a savant, weren’t you? No matter how much you like to swing that sword of yours around, it doesn’t hurt to be well prepared. Pity about the thoron, though. It’s nasty stuff. It bothers me as well, you know. Like I’ve just caught my fingers in a door.”

“Hm,” Felix says, looking away. He hears Linhardt huff.

“I’ve helped you in the past without a bother — or a _thank you_ , mind you — so why not let me help now? It’ll make the trip far more pleasant.”

“Nothing about this is _pleasant_ ,” Felix argues. Linhardt laughs.

“Life is what we make it,” he agrees. “All the same...”

“Fine,” Felix relents, although he makes no motion to show it. Linhardt shifts a little closer and hovers his hands over Felix’s lap. Something warm gathers in the space between them. It smells a little like chamomile. _Strange_ , Felix thinks.

“There,” Linhardt says just as he chases the ache from Felix’s fingertips. “Better?”

“It’s fine,” Felix snaps. He works his gloves back on and snatches up the reins. There’s no need for it, but he slaps them against the horses, earning himself a snort from one of the mares as they lurch forward a little faster.

“I don’t mind being helpful, as long as it’s not too much of a chore,” Linhardt adds.

Felix grunts.

“That’s meant to be an invitation,” Linhardt says.

“What?”

“It’s not unheard of for an old soldier to have a few aches and pains,” Linhardt replies. His voice is sweet enough to convince Felix that he’s got some second meaning hidden beneath each syllable. Felix imagines the sly glitter of his blue eyes, although he doesn’t bother to turn to look at them. “Nor an old mage to help soothe them.”

“I’m fine,” Felix insists. He gives the reins another swing. 

“That isn’t what I asked,” Linhardt says, but he doesn’t press on it any further. He yawns again instead, and hums for a while, and before long he’s crumpled forward, his arms crossed and his head bobbing against the roll of the wheels while he drowses.

Stupid bastard.

There aren’t so many marauders anymore, but this is how people die on the road: tumbling off of benches after they fall asleep under the sun. Or the drizzle, as it so happens now. Felix chews over the idea for awhile before he turns and catches the spectacles from the tip of Linhardt’s nose before they fall. They’re pretty. He bunches the reins in one hand to inspect them more closely with the second. He isn’t surprised by the mother-of-pearl in the temples, although he is amused to find that one of the lenses warps the vision of the forest beyond it enough to convince him that perhaps they do serve some practical purpose, after all. Well, but they’re all getting old now, aren’t they? An old soldier and an old mage, Linhardt had said. Shit. It’s better than old buried bones.

* * *

“But what about the inn?” 

“The inn’s too far,” Felix replies, pausing between each word to hammer in a stake. Linhardt watches in dismay, becoming more crestfallen with every strike that brings their tents into shape.

“ _Too far_ ,” Linhardt begs, “surely it’s only a few hours more.”

“In the dark, over muddy roads,” Felix explains. He stands to observe his handiwork before turning to collect a pair of bedrolls from the cart. “If we lame the horses you can say goodbye to all of your godsdamned crates.”

“They aren’t just _crates_ ,” Linhardt insists, mincing around their scattered things as he chases after Felix. “And if the roads are muddy then certainly this place is, too!”

“You’ll survive.”

“I might not. What if I catch a chill? Forgive me if I don’t suspect you’ll be so tender a nursemaid.”

“Probably not,” Felix agrees as he tosses a bedroll into his tent and then another into the one beside it.

“And what about dinner?”

“We have bread and cheese.”

“Bread and cheese is not a meal.”

“You won’t starve,” Felix insists. He’s certainly eaten worse. Linhardt doesn’t look convinced.

“And a bath?”

“We passed over a river not long before we stopped,” Felix replies, nodding over his shoulder at the faint rustle of water beyond the clearing ringing their campsite.

“Surely you aren’t suggesting that I bathe in a _river._ ”

“Better that you don’t,” Felix agrees with a grunt. “It’s dark.”

“Well, I’m not going to sleep smelling like a horse. Some of us find such a thing distasteful.”

“Then you’d best get used to the taste of river water,” Felix replies. The mote of light Linhardt had cast after the sun had set — keeping Linhardt well lit but doing little for Felix’s work of making camp, he’d noted dryly — orbits the mage’s head at a frazzled pace.

“You won’t be paid if I drown,” Linhardt huffs, crossing his arms tight over his chest. Felix hums.

“Vestra’s already paid me half.”

“You are a _scoundrel_ ,” Linhardt cries. He storms to the cart with the contention — quite frankly, its the fastest that Felix has ever seen him move — and snatches a little folded bag from the mess inside. A towel follows after, which seems to mean that Felix hasn’t convinced him about the dangers of bathing in the dark. Felix fights the urge to take a surreptitious sniff of his own underarm. He’s met blushing maids with less demanding ablutions than Linhardt. What the hell is that all about?

“An absolute _fiend_ ,” Linhardt continues. It seems as though he’s said a few other things that Felix has ignored. Felix watches bemused as the man stomps towards the sound of running water. A second mote of light has joined the first, casting a bright, cheery beam across the knotty roots of the forest floor. “Not all of us relish the idea of living as urchins, you know. As if I could possibly sleep with grime under my nails.”

Grime under his nails. Linhardt hasn’t done much more than _sit_ since they left Enbarr. What the hell is he talking about?

“And without hot water,” Linhardt’s voice adds in dismay from the shadows, “as if we’re living in a cave!”

Felix eyes the tidy circle of their camp and briefly considers starting a fire. The crash of Linhardt’s boots through the forest delays the idea. It’ll be a problem if he gets eaten by a bear, Felix realizes. For one, what the hell is he going to do with the cart? He sighs and curses for good measure before snatching his sword to sling over his shoulder and turning to follow where Linhardt has gone. A little mote of light is waiting for him a dozen paces into the wood, which makes him smirk, although no one’s there to see it.

“...and _leeches_ ,” Linhardt is grumbling when Felix finds him. He has his back to him, hands busy with the front buttons of his robes. How does he stand it, Felix wonders idly as he leans against a tree: always dressed as though he’s preparing for an autumn chill? The southerners have always been so strange to him. Then again, he’s heard them teasing the perpetual flush of his own cheeks against the heat, as well as his resilient preference for leather and fur. Maybe none of them are anything other than the places where they were born.

Linhardt strips off his outer robes, folds them neatly, drapes them along a log. Next comes his undershirt, quickly unbuttoned and discarded. His body below is nearly as pale as the cotton. Still dressed in his wide-legged trousers as he is (and still mewling miserably like a wet cat), his new nakedness has already transformed him into something Felix hadn’t quite expected. Watching him, Felix is immediately reminded of the old, gilded fantasies that had once lined the Fraldarius library shelves.

The northern forests belonged to the nymphs, those books had said. Before the war, snow-born Faerghans had even left offerings for them: venison and apples and sprigs of wheat. Sometimes the duchy’s serving girls had gossiped about the old ways, when their ancestors had offered up blushing virgins to the wood. It’d been an honor, those old stories had promised. The nymphs were beautiful beyond compare.

Felix sees that storytelling now in the narrow slip of Linhardt’s waist and the dark emerald of his hair, spilled loose like a regal cape across the slope of his slender back. For a moment Felix is transfixed, but it’s quickly broken when Linhardt turns to expose a long, jagged scar splitting him apart from a spot just below his collarbones. He’s too busy with the buttons of his trousers to notice the way that Felix looks away, nor how the slight flush of his cheeks blanches bone-white.

Felix remembers that scar. It’d happened in a bloody place. He can smell the fire, the sweat, the ichor. A rare battle where they’d lost too much ground. A trio of swordsmen in Blaiddyd blue had found Linhardt, and recognized him as the man responsible for resurrecting so many Imperial soldiers. Felix had been close, but not close enough. Caspar had been closer, but of course he’d been. They’d always fought like that. It’d driven Byleth mad. What use was a brute like Caspar if he always hung so far behind the frontlines?

One of the swordsmen had cut Linhardt down before either of them could’ve possibly done anything about it. Caspar hadn’t like that. He’d cleaved one of the swordsmen in half with his axe before the two left behind cornered him. That had been the end. Felix had smelled it on the wind. You learned how to read a battlefield when you lived the way they had. It hadn’t been heroic, just like nothing ever is in the way it really happens versus the way people talk about it after. One of the Kingdom men had very nearly cut Caspar’s head from his shoulders, but not enough for his neck to be completely severed. He’d fallen all the same. Felix had run after that: not because he was frightened by those fucking swordsmen, or even by Caspar’s corpse, but because a dark, sickly magic had filled the field so thickly that afterwards he realized his lashes had gone and the hair on his arms had disintegrated.

That must be another legend, now. Some stretch of cursed earth where nothing will ever grow. It’s not really a surprise. After all, the blushing virgins they gave to those nymphs never came home.

* * *

Felix wishes he hadn’t seen that scar. 

He drinks a flask of something fiery with their dinner of crusty bread and cheese, but it doesn’t really help. After Linhardt convinces him that he can manage first watch, too preoccupied by a book he’d rustled from the cart to consider sleeping (and not with _wet hair_ , he’d reassured Felix curtly), Felix hides himself in his tent and isn’t surprised to find ghosts waiting for him in his bedroll.

That fucking battle. He sees it, smells it, tastes it. Caspar hadn’t been the only one who’d died. Felix has relived it in plenty of different ways over the past seven years. Sometimes Caspar is the one to do it, actually. Most times it’s him. But the truth is, it’d just been some lucky soldier in the right place at the right time. Or maybe not. Maybe the victor had been another body Felix had stumbled over when he’d found him.

It was supposed to be Felix who struck the killing blow. That was the bargain he’d made when he’d abandoned Faerghus. If he was going to let his friends fall, he’d be the one to carry them. He hadn’t been able to save them from Dimitri, but at least maybe he could offer them that. But he’d fucked that up, too. Had found Sylvain crushed beneath his horse with a scarlet-feathered arrow in his shoulder and another one in his throat.

Lady. That had been the horse’s name, although maybe she was the second. The first had always hated him. Maybe even then she’d known what he’d one day become. Felix had been too tired to do much of anything about it. Not like one man could move a destrier, and not like he would’ve been able to convince anyone to help him bury a fallen foe.

 _Foe. Enemy_. None of those words had ever suited any of them. Sylvain had just looked like Sylvain, like a boy, barely a man. His nose had broken and been set slightly crooked since the last time Felix had seen him (red-faced, wide-eyed, furious). How strange it was that they’d already changed.

But then again, they hadn’t. Felix had knelt beside him and stroked his hair and smelled that stupid fucking aftershave he’d always used, even when the fields fell barren and the Kingdom’s counts and earls started to eat their hunting dogs. _Fuck_. Felix’s throat tightens. It’s in his nose, even now. Sweet, musky, ostentatious. He can feel Lady crushing him: splintering his ribs with every exhale. _Fuck, fuck_. It’s dark. The world’s folded up on top of him. He’s falling, and somehow he knows he’s never going to stop. That makes it worse. _Fuck_. He just wants to —

A light.

“The fuck,” he stammers, wincing against the sudden glow. He realizes too late that the words he’s spoken are real. Felix lurches from his bedroll and nearly knocks the crown of his head into Linhardt’s teeth. The rest of Linhardt is there as well: gangly limbs, long robes, long hair. “What the _fuck_ are you doing?”

“Hello,” Linhardt replies, somewhat amused. He’s kneeling at Felix’s side and bent over him in an angle that traps the claustrophobia from his nightmare and keeps it alive. Fuck this. It’s over. He’s going to yell a few curses and then they’re going to pile back onto the cart and ride to Enbarr. Felix doesn’t care if it kills him. 

The sunshiny mote hovering above his head suddenly splinters into two dozen more. They flutter around him like fireflies. A strange calm teases at the edges of Felix’s frayed nerves. It’s enough for him to ease backwards onto his elbows, although he doesn’t do anything about the snarl still pointed in Linhardt’s direction. 

“I’ve just stumbled upon something terribly fascinating in my reading,” Linhardt tells him nonsensically. His voice is smooth and soothing. He reaches out to flatten a wrinkle in Felix’s blanket. Felix’s molars grind. “I doubt I’ll manage a wink of sleep tonight. Why don’t you take it from me. I suppose we’ll both prefer it if I sleep through the day. Particularly if there’s to be more rain,” he adds with a sardonic twist of his tone. “Don’t worry. If I spot any ill-intentioned badgers meaning to storm our camp, I promise to alert you posthaste.”

Linhardt doesn’t seem as though he’ll be convinced otherwise. Well, to hell with it, anyways. Felix isn’t responsible for his strange, nocturnal ways. 

“Fine,” he grits. Linhardt smiles his sleepy smile and stands. His spell lingers, tumbling and turning in a merry halo around Felix’s head. “What the hell is this?”

“I find that it helps,” is all that Linhardt says. Felix would argue, but Linhardt’s already disappeared through the front of his tent into the campsite again. Felix bats at the motes. They slip through his fingers like water. A pleasant buzz pools in his palm and trickles down his arm. It makes him feel suddenly tired.

 _Whatever_ , he thinks as he sinks back into his bedroll. Even he isn’t stubborn enough to think that he can win a fistfight against light. The motes wink back at him victoriously. He watches them sparkle until a soft, dreamless sleep slips over him like a sheet.

* * *

“Must you _always_ drink?” 

“Yes,” Felix answers. He takes a swig from his tankard, too. And firstly, it’s a stupid question. What the hell else do you do in a tavern? This one is no different than the dozen others they’ve patronized in their endless fucking odyssey, and quite frankly the ale is just as hoppy and slightly off as the others, too. The important part is that it’s doing what it’s supposed to do.

“Don’t you ever get tired of it?” Linhardt asks, exasperated.

“No.”

“Has anyone ever told you that you’re a fantastic dinner partner?”

Felix realizes that this question is hypothetical. Quite frankly, he wishes all of Linhardt’s questions were. He takes another drink and ignores the way Linhardt is staring daggers at him over his dinner of some sort of mince-meat pie.

“Fine,” Linhardt huffs. Felix cocks a brow as he watches him suddenly wave one of the serving girls over. “You think you’re the only one who can play this game, do you?”

“What are you doing?” Felix challenges, although it’s another hopelessly stupid question. Just as stupid as Linhardt snatching that dripping tankard from the tavern girl. His wrist bends precariously as he does his best to haul it to their table. Felix hasn’t seen him drink anything more stiff than an overbrewed pot of tea in all the cursed years he’s known him. The face Linhardt makes when he takes a tentative sip doesn’t bode well, either.

“Disgusting,” Linhardt quips.

“That’s the charm,” Felix agrees. Linhardt rolls his eyes. Amazingly, he takes another drink. This one’s longer. Felix eyes the way his throat bobs with a sinking feeling.

“I’m not going to carry you to bed,” Felix promises him dryly.

“As if I’d let you,” Linhardt sniffs. “And who’s to say I won’t be doing the carrying? You’ve already had such a tidy head start.”

“Fuck you,” Felix slurs. Linhardt raises a slender brow. Well, yeah, sure, that was maybe unearned. And maybe he’s been a bit too enthusiastic with his drinking. But it’s day eleven of their soggy trip north, and any more days of drizzle are certainly going to be his end. Might as well be pickled and happy for it when the time comes. 

“I cannot _believe_ that you were meant to be a duke,” Linhardt observes. Felix growls. It’s probably not very dukely.

“Yes, yes,” Linhardt quickly adds with the flourish of his fingers, “I know. Your _rules_. But there wasn’t a war when you were born, now was there? And, by the way, we just so happen to share the same war. And on the same side, even. As if I’ve managed some trick by keeping myself domesticated while you’ve let yourself run wild.”

“Oh yes, you’re the very _image_ of normalcy,” Felix shoots back. Linhardt’s lips quirk into a smile-adjacent shape. “Dressed like some kind of fucking midwife and dissecting frogs in the middle of the night.”

“ _Midwife_?” Linhardt blurts, laughing, his voice bouncing into the bowl of his tankard as he takes another long drink. Felix raises an arm and gestures at the empty space below his own well-tailored sleeve.

“What the hell is all of that?”

Mimicking Felix, Linhardt raises his arm in confusion and stares nonplussed at his wide-belled cuffs.

“I’ll have you know,” Linhardt pouts, “that anyone who treats themselves to three whole meals a day would call this _fashionable_. Besides, it’s very comfortable. More than your stinking leathers.”

“Gods forbid you aren’t comfortable,” Felix snorts. Linhardt takes on a newly horrified stare.

“Quite right,” he agrees. “And what was that about _frogs_?”

They drink another round. Round three brings on Linhardt’s rather convincing Hubert impression. Round four, and Felix unbuttons his collar, and forgets that he’s supposed to be checking the front door with every fourth breath for whatever long-forgotten hunter that will finally find them there. Round five, and Linhardt spills his tankard, and stares at it sleepily, bewildered, as if the puddle dripping onto the floor has suddenly spoken to him aloud.

“Bed,” Felix hiccups, noticing the dismay in the serving girl’s face as she spots another mess to clean and the way that Linhardt has already attempted to solve it by sopping up the tabletop with his ridiculous, billowy sleeve.

“What?” Linhardt drawls. “Really? Well, alright.”

He stumbles to his feet and very nearly topples over. Felix snorts and slinks to his side.

“I’m quite alright,” Linhardt promises him, although it’s not like Felix was about to offer him his arm. They careen together through the tavern’s thinning crowd and begin a perilous mount of the stairs.

“You’re,” Felix starts, and laughs, nearly doubling over as he watches Linhardt step on his tails and sway uneasily ahead of him, “your stupid fucking _robes_.”

“Oh yes,” Linhardt answers, his words tumbling into a cluttered drawl, “and you’re one to say something about them with that despicable vest of yours.”

“‘S’not a _vest_ ,” Felix replies, suddenly feeling rather sore at the idea. They both totter precariously at the landing splitting the stairway in half. “‘S’a _jerkin_.”

“Yes, of course, how foolish of me,” Linhardt simpers. He adjusts his spectacles to get a better look at the ugly, wizened thing hanging loose and unfastened from Felix’s shoulders. “I think my grandfather had one just like it. Poor old fellow had cataracts so thick you’d think he’d dunked his head in cream.”

“Get on it with,” Felix barks, although it sounds more like _geyunnathit_. He storms the next set of stairs before bothering to check if Linhardt is following behind. The man’s swallowed giggles confirm it, in any case.

“And — _hah!_ — and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a tighter pair of trousers,” Linhardt adds when Felix summits the last step. “What do you do, paint them on?”

“Fuck you,” Felix says once again. “As if you wanna know.”

He doesn’t really know what that means. Whatever. He grips the knob leading into his rented room and barrels inside. For some unspeakable reason, Linhardt follows behind.

“The hell’re you doing,” Felix challenges. “You’re one over.”

“Yes, well,” Linhardt answers neatly. Felix hears the click of the lock. He blinks blearily at the sight of Linhardt’s gloved fingers clumsily unfastening the buttons at the collar of his robes.

“Stupid,” Felix says. “People saw us come up here. They’ll say something.”

Linhardt’s kittenish smile makes Felix immediately regret the words. Alright, so maybe that was a _Faerghan_ thing to say. Not like it’s not true.

“Of course they will,” Linhardt purrs. He’s finished with his first set of buttons. Felix eyes the pale of his throat warily. “If you were an even half-respectable gossip you’d know that I’m a _world-famous_ homosexual.”

“For fucks’ sake,” Felix chokes. “What’s wrong with you?”

Linhardt frowns, but that doesn’t stop him from advancing a step closer.

“Nothing is wrong with me,” he promises him, his voice suddenly uncharacteristically stern. Felix would take him more seriously if his cheeks weren’t so pink. His lips, too. What the hell’s he been doing, _biting_ them?

“But that doesn’t have anything to do with you,” Linhardt continues. His gloved fingers continue their way down the front split of his buttoned undershirt. “You’re like a rope tangled into three dozen knots, you know that? Quite honestly, it’s painful to watch.”

“Forgive me,” Felix sneers sardonically. Infuriatingly, Linhardt doesn’t back down. He starts on the laces of his own trousers instead. Felix realizes in that moment that, whatever’s going on, he’s losing ground.

“And your miserable vocabulary doesn’t trick me for a moment, by the way,” Linhardt adds. “I’m not frightened by four-letter words. Sit down.”

“What?”

“Sit _down_ ,” Linhardt repeats. For some godsforsaken reason, Felix does. The bed creaks beneath him. Linhardt slips off his trousers, suddenly stripped to nothing but his gloves and his open shirt, and kneels between Felix’s legs.

“What’re you doing?”

“Untangling,” Linhardt replies cryptically. “Here. Hold this.”

“What?”

Felix obeys, despite all rhyme and reason. His mind stutters in confusion as he realizes that he’s suddenly fisting a handful of Linhardt’s hair.

“You can pretend all you like that we don’t know one another,” Linhardt says as he reaches for Felix’s laces. Felix shivers and grips tighter at Linhardt’s hair. It’s smooth and silken against the old calluses lining his palm. “It doesn’t much make a difference to me. I saw you watching me bathe, you know,” he then sighs, sounding pleased, and Felix nearly swallows his tongue when he realizes that he can feel Linhardt’s hot breath on his cock. “How nice not to be disappointed.”

“I don’t understand you,” Felix admits breathlessly. Linhardt peeks up at him through his lashes. His eyes are blue, but not like the blue he’s known before. Felix feels the warm glow of those bewitched fireflies again, although this time the room’s still dark beneath the single candle flickering at the nearby desk. 

“That’s alright,” Linhardt says. “Very few people do. The important thing is if you _want_ me.” He presses his cheek to Felix’s thigh, dragging him by the arm as he does, Felix’s fingers still buried in his hair. “Can we agree on that, at least?”

“Fine,” Felix snarls. Linhardt grins and takes a bite through the thin leather of Felix’s pants.

“That’s a terrible answer,” Linhardt drawls. “Are you always this impossible?”

“Yes,” Felix snaps. He tugs on Linhardt’s hair to make it clear the answer’s meant for both questions. Linhardt’s grin grows devious as he leans forward on his knees. His fingers splay over Felix’s thighs, steadying himself in his drunken crouch as he slips closer to lap his tongue up the length of Felix’s cock freed unceremoniously from his unlaced fly.

“Shit,” Felix gasps. He feels a puff of breath as Linhardt laughs. Felix tightens his grip in retribution until it’s Linhardt’s turn to suck in a sound. He moans afterwards, which makes Felix’s cheeks catch fire. He realizes that he’s lost that round, too.

“Linhardt,” he starts, although he’s not quite certain what he means to say, and it doesn’t really matter, because then Linhardt has started to draw him into his mouth. Felix feels all of his muscles turn molten and does his best to hold on. His grip makes Linhardt groan again. He pulls harder, and reels from the sight of the man’s hollowed cheeks. _Fuck_. It’s been awhile. He’s not going to admit it to anybody, of course, and certainly not to Linhardt, but damn if he’s not good at it. Felix’s eyes roll back into his skull at the slickness of Linhardt’s tongue and the tight vice of his eager throat.

“Shit, Lin.” He swallows the second half of his name, and knows that he’ll regret it later. “Wait. I’m gonna—”

Linhardt only seems spurred on by the idea. Felix loses the sound of the boastful conversations downstairs and the creak of the bed, fixated entirely by the sudden rasp of his own breath and the obscene noises that Linhardt’s making with his divine mouth. He looks down at him, voice catching in his throat, and focuses on the dark lacework of Linhardt’s lashes splayed against his cheeks. _Nymphs_ , he thinks again, and then he thinks about sharp, monstrous teeth, and for some fucked up reason that pushes him over the edge.

“Fu- _uck_ ,” Felix manages as he comes down the back of Linhardt’s throat. Linhardt hums a contented sound in response, hovering carefully between Felix’s knees while he swallows. Felix swoons against the suck of his mouth and curses every deity that he can remember. He slumps backwards against the bed when Linhardt finally releases him with a _pop_. The other man then crawls up onto the bed to join him, moving lithe and languid like some sort of self-satisfied house cat. Something akin to guilt pricks to life inside Felix’s chest. He clears his throat. 

“Do you want me to,” he starts awkwardly, but Linhardt cuts him short with the fluff of his pillow.

“No, that’s quite alright,” Linhardt answers primly. He flicks back the bedsheets and slips himself inside. “I don’t mind debts.” The bed squeaks as he settles himself into his preferred shape against the mattress. “But do take off those ridiculous pants.”

Felix stares at the ceiling. It doesn’t offer any answers for this strange predicament he’s found himself in. Already he can hear Linhardt’s breathing slowing into a snore. Certainly he recognizes the sound of it by now. So he shoves his fingers beneath his belt and shucks off his pants and follows after with his shirt, not seeing much point for propriety any longer. Then he follows after Linhardt to sneak beneath the sheets, although he’s forced to lay his head against the stiff mattress, his pillow long stolen and now hidden under a sea of emerald hair.

Unsurprisingly, sleep comes quickly. It’s the ale, he tells himself as he drifts off, although he knows it’s not. Linhardt is warm beside him. Felix feels himself falling into rhythm with his breathing. It’s been a long time since he’s done something like that. Strange. All of it’s just... _strange_.

When he wakes in the morning to the first light of the dawn, he finds himself a fist’s distance away from Linhardt’s slumbering face. He looks peaceful and lovely, and both to an infuriating degree. Felix wonders briefly what happened to his spectacles. That makes him feel annoyingly bashful, so he forgets it before he thinks about anything else too closely. His eyes settle on one of Linhardt’s hands instead, cupped limply between them. He’s still wearing his gloves. Felix nearly smirks at the sight until he catches the hint of something dark and bruised beneath the hem.

Curious, he curls a little closer. He sucks in a breath when he recognizes the spiderwebbed burns of dark magic on Linhardt’s skin. Felix winces and thinks about things he shouldn’t: an abattoir under red banners, crushed bodies, ancient evergreens, sandalwood cologne. In a day they’ll be in Gaspard. It’s been ten years since he’s walked on Faerghus soil. He wonders what will happen then. It won’t be anything good.

“Good morning,” Linhardt suddenly murmurs. Eyes still closed, he gropes clumsily across the mattress until his fingers brush against Felix’s chest. Felix doesn’t answer. Despite his better judgment, he also doesn’t run.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Up next: Linhardt and Felix arrive in Kleiman after ghost hunting in Old Faerghus.
> 
> Please come say hello on Twitter @fouxdogue!


	2. How to Come Home

Home doesn’t look how he remembers it. Felix had left his motherland when Cornelia and Edelgard and Dimitri were all still fighting over the right to claim her. He’d seen their hunger in the gaunt cheeks of farmers’ sons sent to the frontlines with scythes and rusted swords. Funny, how he’d fought with those boys in one season and killed them in the next. And Faerghus, at that point crippled and dragging her limbs, had still nearly torn him apart when he’d abandoned her. Even now he can remember the winter chill ripping at his clothes, and how the trees had bent double against the wind like claws grasping to drag him down. The whole world had sounded like it was suffocating. Sometimes he misremembers the pneumonic wheeze of his horse running itself to death for the whispers of a dark-haired woman trapped beneath the teal bedding that would become her shroud.

_Mother_ , he thinks, but he doesn’t see her now. Gaspard is gold cornfields and fat cows flicking their tails at flies. The path ahead is dry again. Their cart makes quick work of the road. Even the piebald nags seem charmed by the countryside. Felix doesn’t bother to hold the reins. There’s nowhere else for them to go but onwards. He keeps his eyes ahead. 

Linhardt is asleep. It would’ve been easy enough to forget that he was there, except for the fact that he’d already made that a damned impossibility. Felix lets his cheeks blush. He only allows himself the luxury because he’s alone. Or at least he _had_ been, and for far longer than he can break down into weeks and days. Now, even with Linhardt curled like a cat in the back of the cart, Felix can feel his hands on him. The warmth of his skin through his gloves.

Plenty of people have touched him before. He’d started too young, even, maybe. His first had been a stablehand. _Lucas_ or _Lucian_ or _Lyle_. Stablehands don’t have surnames, so at least Felix doesn’t have to feel guilty about forgetting that one, too. He remembers the smell of hay, bruised knees, and calloused fingers. He’d liked being touched by hands that knew work. It’d made it easier to forget his horrible dinners with his father. There hadn’t been much of a point in breaking all of that fine Fraldarius china in revenge for what Rodrigue had done, but getting fucked by illiterate village boys had satisfied the same desire.

It’d become a different sort of urge after he and Dimitri had been tasked with putting down that cursed rebellion. Lucky for him that afterwards Felix had been named a squire. He’d been plunged too deep into death when he’d listened to the prince laugh while he shoved his lance through warm bodies, but when Felix slept with blooded soldiers he could safely peek at it in order to become better acquainted.

Gods. Sylvain had been so shocked by that. He’d always been convinced that his two year seniority had granted him first place with everything. Cocky bastard. Felix can still remember that little crooked grin of his when he’d watched in wonder as Felix had dropped to his knees behind the dustiest shelf in the monastery library. He’d worn a different version of the same look two weeks later, after Felix had made quick work of cutting some pitiful bandit apart.

_I didn’t know you were so experienced._

Hah.

Felix turns to hunt for his bag tucked into a corner at the front of the cart. He’s quick to find the flask waiting for him. He spins the cap between his fingers and takes a long, burning draw. _Promiscuous_. That’s what _experienced_ means. He chews over the word as he swallows. _Debauched. Indiscriminate_. What better words to describe what they did during the war?

He takes another drink.

Linhardt had said nearly the same sort of thing to him that night in the tavern three days prior. He’d gone to his knees, too. Maybe they’re not so different, him and Minister Hevring. For some reason it’s a terrible thought. Felix takes a third swallow and forces himself to refocus on the farmland gobbling up the world around them.

They’re not so far away from old Castle Gaspard, although Felix only knows that because all of the maps he’s memorized. He’d never had a reason to visit Gaspard as an heir. The region was humble and quiet compared to Fraldarius, and certainly Fhirdiad. All he’d ever really known about Gaspard was Ashe. Felix takes another drink and sees the young man’s freckles in the pebbles scattered across the road. Ashe had always been so stubborn about forcing his ridiculous books on him back at Garreg Mach. Maybe he’d thought that all of those damsels in distress would’ve given Felix the escape he’d so desperately wanted.

And what good that’d done for any of them. _Shit_. What good had it done for Ashe? Felix hadn’t seen him carry any books with him into the cathedral after Byleth and the Black Eagles had returned victorious from culling the Western Church. No knight in shining armor was going to sew his stepfather’s head back onto his shoulders, especially not after it’d been removed by divine-fucking-order.

_I’m sorry_ , he’d told Ashe. _I’m sorry_ , and he’d meant it, because he’d known in that moment that Ashe was _good_ , especially in the way he’d taken the news. He hadn’t cauterized his insides like Felix had after Glenn, back then when he’d been too young to understand the consequences. Maybe that’s why Ashe never ran. There’s nothing in this world more valiant than fighting in the name of a king.

Ashe is dead, too. Felix doesn’t know when or how he died. Dimitri had been too mad to crown, and Cornelia had hunted most of Faerghus’ storied knights, so there’d been no one to knight him and give him the right to be listed among the dead. He must be in some pauper’s grave somewhere, his bones all jumbled together with other unlucky sons. _The end_ , just like all of his pretty stories. Felix drains the last dredges of his flask.

By nightfall they come upon another village linked in the daisy-chain between Enbarr and Kleiman. Linhardt wakes just as they roll past a gaggle of giggling children chasing a sow-skin ball in the square. There are candles in every window of every home, and groups of sleepy workmen slowly meandering through the streets with their wives, arm-in-arm and smiling as they remember their days for one another aloud. He can hear music coming from inside the tavern where they’ll soon dine on sausages and cloudy ale. _Gaspard_ , Felix suddenly wants to shout, and so desperately it makes his skin itch: _Lonato, Christophe! Do you remember them?_

But they’re just more more black blots in a closed storybook, aren’t they? Lonato, Christophe, Glenn, Felix, Rodrigue, Dimitri, Sylvain, Ashe. Fraldarius, Blaiddyd, _Faerghus_. What the hell does any of that mean to a man with the dirt of the fields under his nails? Their cart finally rolls to the front of the tavern. If Linhardt notices the way that Felix sways and wobbles after he leaps down from the bench, he doesn’t say anything about it.

* * *

“Let’s go to the market,” Linhardt suggests the morning after. Felix stirs his spoon through the thick paste of his porridge and briefly wonders if they’ve both lost their minds. 

“The _market_?”

Linhardt smiles at Felix’s cocked brow. It’s a strange moment. He’d never taken Linhardt for much of a strolling shopper, particularly in an idyllic place like this. It’s much easier to picture him picking through shrunken heads and dried lizards in some sort of midnight black market. Linhardt snorts and wags his head, as if he’s learned the trick of mind reading. _Shit_. Maybe he has.

“I’ve had enough bread and cheese, thank you very much,” he explains. “Just because you’ve lost your palate doesn’t mean that I want to grind mine down with all of that crust. I’d like some more of those lovely sausages,” he adds, and in a way that makes Felix think it might be a double entendre. Felix rolls his eyes, but Linhardt remains undeterred.

“And fruit, perhaps,” he continues. He also admits defeat against his tasteless breakfast, leaving his bowl mostly untouched when he stands with the flutter of his long sleeves. “Have you eaten a fruit before?”

_They’ll bruise and rot in the heat_ , the pragmatic voice inside of Felix’s head provides. _Fuck you_ , the other voices suggest.

“Gaspard is known for its orchards,” is what he inexplicably offers aloud. Linhardt’s face brightens with a smile.

“Apples it is, then.”

Felix grunts and flings his spoon aside. Seized by what must be a moment of madness, he nearly suggests the region’s famous honey as well, but then he spots Linhardt digging beneath the table for the satchel he’d brought with him earlier that morning. Felix watches in dismay — horror, even — as Linhardt stands with a lavender parasol propped against his shoulder.

“You’re joking.”

“Joking about what, exactly?” Linhardt asks as he saunters towards the door.

“What are you? A fucking _dowager_?”

The door creaks open under Linhardt’s palm. His navy robes turn nearly white under the sun. Felix sweats just looking at him. Linhardt gives him a commiserating smile and fluffs the parasol with the twist of his wrist before flipping it open through the doorframe.

“Of course not,” Linhardt simpers. He steps outside under the parasol’s shadow. “My father was a count. I would have inherited his title on my own merits, thank you, if we’d bothered with keeping them.”

“I know who your father was,” Felix growls. Linhardt hums and twirls the handle between his fingers, sending polka dotted shadows across his cheeks from the lace webbed between the parasol’s prongs. Some of the farmer’s wives gossiping in the market outside have parasols, too, but none of them have fucking _lace_.

“You look ridiculous,” Felix grits through his teeth just as he joins Linhardt outside.

“ _I_ look ridiculous,” Linhardt scoffs, his eyes dipping to the dark spots that Felix has already sweated beneath his arms. “At this rate you’ll be as pink as a piglet by noon. I thought you only melted in the south.”

“Gaspard _is_ the south.”

He fights the urge to wipe at his brow and stomps forward towards the market. Linhardt trails behind him, humming an idle tune while he observes the stalls lined around the square’s four corners with an unhurried stare.

“There,” Linhardt says finally, turning at the sight of green apples piled into pyramids under the watchful eye of some old crone. Felix follows him, busying himself with his usual task of looking for cutthroats in the crowd of toddlers and fat old men.

“How do you like them?” Linhardt asks. “Sweet or tart?”

Felix doesn’t answer. He’s too distracted by a bead of sweat gathering like a pearl on Linhardt’s nape. Earlier, Linhardt had swept all of his hair into a tight knot in anticipation of the heat. He must have been less judicious about buttoning his collar that morning, too. Felix can see more of his long neck than usual. He’s got a freckle just below the taper of his hairline. Felix looks away, turning his gaze on the apples in an effort to convince himself that they’re what he’s suddenly so desperate to sink his teeth into.

“Tart, surely,” Linhardt decides on his behalf. He teases his fingers over a few of the colorful fruit as he makes his selection. Felix purses his lips to agree, but is interrupted by the sudden smash of something rotten against his shoulder.

He grunts and turns, his hand already on the hilt of his sword as he searches for the source of whatever’s ruined his shirt. Another overripe tomato splashes against his chest. He hears Linhardt suck in a breath just as a one-armed man with a drunkard’s nose readies a third volley in his spot at the center of the square.

“You!” the man challenges. His voice is hoarse. Felix recognizes it. Lots of men sound like that after they’ve sucked in too much smoke cast by mages at war. “I knew it was _you_. Mongrel. _Traitor_.”

“Jasper!” a woman cries, gathering her skirts to dart towards the man. A lanky, pimple-faced boy follows at her heels. The man ignores the both of them, no matter how horrified they look when they make it to his side. 

“Off your leash, are you?” Jasper continues venomously. Felix grits his teeth, desperate to respond with unspeakable action. But what the fuck can he do? Massacre a village full of old women and crippled men who’d somehow survived the war? Jasper seems to read his hesitation. He snatches something else from the sack strung over his shoulder. A mealy apple explodes between Felix’s boots.

“Couldn’t help but sneak back here with your tail between your legs, could you? Eh? Need some of our girls to rut before you piss on their fathers’ graves?”

Felix forces his fingers from his sword. Squaring his shoulders, he storms sideways to seek out the shortest path back to the tavern. He doesn’t turn to see if Linhardt follows him. The rest of everything else disappears, too, replaced by the white fog of his fury like sulphur rolling off of a boiling spring.

“Ha! Run! Of course you run. What else are you good for, Fraldarius? Coward! Cut our throats while we’re sleeping, won’t you? You have no honor! You think Faerghus forgets? You can’t kill all of us! No honor!”

The tavern doors crack open beneath the shove of Felix’s arms. One of the serving girls gasps in surprise when he tosses a fistful of gold at her. Afterwards he launches himself up the stairs, snatching his saddlebags from his room and striding into Linhardt’s to do the same just as the man in question skips winded to the top of the stairwell.

“Felix,” Linhardt starts. Felix cuts him short with the crash of his bag into his arms.

“We’re leaving,” he answers tightly. Linhardt frowns.

“Of course,” he sputters, “but—”

Felix doesn’t listen. It doesn’t matter what Linhardt has to say. There’s nothing else to add. Pitiful old Jasper was right. He’s a coward, a man without honor, and now he’s damn well going to run.

* * *

They ride in silence. The countryside is more of the same as before: golden fields, happy herds, trees in full leafy grandeur with boughs bowed by jewel-red fruit. The sky’s so blue that Felix can barely lift his eyes from the draft horses’ bobbing heads. Linhardt is smart enough to keep quiet in the cart, although the weight of his gaze is nearly as terrible as everything else Felix is thinking about. He manages it for a few miserable hours, but when he spots an open field off to the side of the path just as the day transitions into evening he yanks hard on the reins to lead the horses there. No doubt he’ll be crushed to powder otherwise. 

“Felix,” Linhardt tries again, but it’s just as unsuccessful as the first. Felix slips down from the bench of the cart and flings his sword to clatter against the floorboards. If he takes it with him he’ll just ruin the blade by bashing it against whatever solid things he can find, and he’s done that enough times to have at least learned his fucking lesson.

Maybe Linhardt watches him go. Maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he just retreats back into the strange cave of the cart bed again, conjuring spirits or whatever the hell else it is he does when he’s alone. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. All Felix can do is keep on walking before Faerghus swallows him up.

The pasturelands turn into a cornfield. Felix pushes through the stalks and thinks about nothing. That’s what seven years does. There’s nothing left to think about, not anymore. All he does is hiccup and gasp for air. It feels like his ribcage is breaking apart with every staggered step. If he stops moving he’ll probably die. Good riddance. Good fucking luck.

He keeps on walking and not thinking until the cornfield thickens into a forest. It’s filled with the same old oaks as Adrestia. No evergreens yet. His thighs start to burn with fatigue. It’s nearly dark now. If he keeps going much farther he might really get lost. The thought steadies him enough to stop. He plants a hand against a tree trunk and bends forward to catch his breath. It takes awhile. He swallows down each clotted mouthful until he can finally feel his fingers again. Empty fingers, by the way. No one’s been hunting them for even one minute of their absurd journey, but that doesn’t help him feel any less naked. 

_Alright_ , he coaches. It’s the most kindness he’s managed to muster for himself in a long while. _Alright. Come on. Turn around._

His feet comply. They do it slowly, but at least now he’s facing in the right direction. Limping slightly, he follows his odd-paced footprints back towards the cornfield again. By the time he’s retraced his path through the field the sun has dipped completely out of sight. The moon doesn’t do a very good job of replacing it, but there’s a third light that’s started to lure him in. He can smell it before he sees it. Sweet, smoky, alluring.

Building a bonfire seems far too arduous a task for a man like Linhardt. There it is all the same, huge and glowing with an intense yellow-white light that Felix would never be able to make with flint and kindling alone. He can feel it on his face before he’s even made it back into the open field, but unlike the sun’s swelter, there’s something inviting about the heat.

“Hello,” Linhardt greets him. Felix nearly laughs at his underwhelming welcome. He pays more attention to the straw doll that’s demanding most of Linhardt’s attention. The mage merely nods at him when Felix comes to a halt beside his crossed-legged seat, his fingers busy tugging the last few strands in place.

“What the hell is that?” Felix asks. His voice is more of a croak than he’d hoped for. Mercifully, Linhardt doesn’t point it out.

“We’re a little late in the year,” Linhardt explains, circuitous as always, tilting the doll slightly in keen-eyed inspection before setting it aside. He cleans a few stray strands of straw from his lap before he continues. “However, it is my understanding that it is a northern tradition to welcome in the end of winter with a bonfire.”

It’s strange to hear his childhood explained to him like some sort of history lesson. The ever-present knot in Felix’s chest twists into a new shape when he realizes that there’s another doll sitting neatly-knitted next to the first.

“We did something like this in Hevring as well,” Linhardt says. He pauses and pats the tamped field beside him until Felix relents and sits.

“There’s nothing special about setting fires,” Felix counters tartly, nerves still frazzled as he tries to figure out just what in the hell Linhardt’s getting at. “Of course you did.”

Linhardt nods. He’s never had the best posture, but there’s something newly deflated in the way his shoulders have slumped, as if his robes suddenly weigh on him as heavily as they look.

“It was never my favorite celebration,” he adds. Linhardt says it with his usual sarcasm, although it’s lost all of its edge. “I had nothing to burn at the time.”

Felix looks at the dolls again, although they aren’t dolls, really. They’d seemed much bigger when he’d been a boy. A younger version of himself had filled them with simple anxieties, like the fear of falling from Dimitri’s good graces, or the shame in losing a foot race against Ingrid when both of their fathers were there to watch. One year Sylvain had named his effigy _Miklan_. Something in his eyes when he’d shared the joke had given Felix a stomachache for the rest of the night. They’d all stopped building bonfires after Duscur. That had come before Felix had been given anything worthwhile to cast into the flames.

Linhardt stands and selects one of the effigies. He cradles it in his arms like a precious babe. Felix sees the war in him for the first time.

“Edelgard wouldn’t approve of such a sentiment,” Linhardt says, his voice low and listless, “but I’ve always been of the belief that there are very few true victories in this life, and certainly none made from violence. You simply succumb to something like that, or you survive it. I’m not even certain if one is better than the other.”

“Whatever you say,” Felix replies flatly. Linhardt nods and strokes a finger along the effigy’s blank face with tender affection.

“What’s important is the beauty in it.”

Linhardt’s grip slackens on the straw doll. Felix watches transfixed as a white-hot sliver splits from the bonfire and slithers towards them through the air. Linhardt draws out his arms. The effigy floats upward under the influence of his invisible magic and into the path of the fire. A kaleidoscope of colors erupts from the straw when it catches fire. Each shade is more brilliant and impossible than the last. 

“The beauty in what?” Felix can’t help but ask. He watches the effigy crackle and turn an effervescent violet. It’s bright enough to cast them both in the color, although Felix can’t imagine he strikes the same image that Linhardt does dipped in a king’s share of purple light.

“In wherever this is that we’ve found ourselves.”

The effigy fizzles and pops. The purple darkens to cerulean and then flickers to a bright yellow-green. Felix stands, lightheaded. He feels his fingers grip the second straw doll as he strides forward. Linhardt stiffens slightly when Felix steps to his side, although his eyes don’t stray from the glittering effigy. Felix should say something. Ask Linhardt what he means. Ask him what the hell he’s doing there. Felix knows enough about magic to know that the puddles he pulls from to bring a handful of thoron to life are nothing compared to the oceans that Linhardt must swim in. Linhardt doesn’t need a guard. He could burn all of Gaspard to the ground.

Felix looks down at the doll instead. For the first time in his life, he recognizes the effigy’s face. He misses it. Maybe there are more complicated words for the ache that gathers in his chest, but _missing_...Gods, that’s what it is. He misses that face, just like he misses those old evergreens, and the sound of his mother singing him to sleep, and how his father had smiled at him that first time he’d swung around a wooden sword. And the thing about _missing_ is that you never really get back what’s already gone.

Felix sighs deep enough to push out the heaviness in his lungs and tosses the effigy into the fire. The bonfire turns into a bouquet: hydrangea, daffodil, peony pink. It’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.

“Welcome home, Felix.”

_Shit._

He feels his eyes grow hot. It’s been so goddamned long. When he’d been a little boy, all he’d ever done was cry. He was so certain that he’d rid himself of the bad habit, but here it fucking is again. His body is desperate for it, but even with everything that’s happened, Felix isn’t willing to admit defeat. Instead he turns on his heel and closes the distance between them to grab Linhardt by the collar.

Linhardt looks surprised. No doubt he thinks he’s going to hit him. They both should know Felix better than to expect him to be romantic. He leans forward to kiss him before they have the chance for any more misconceptions. For a moment Linhardt is frozen in place, and Felix feels like the most miserable man alive, but then a pair of gloved hands link themselves behind his neck and draw him in closer.

Linhardt’s lips part under the slick of his tongue. There’s a gentle way of doing this, but Felix’s never lived a life tailored for those sorts of lessons. Linhardt doesn’t seem to mind the hungry way he kisses him, nor the way he pushes against his shoulders to ease him to his knees. Felix chases after him, the both of them still gasping and biting at each others’ lips as they tumble together to the ground. He crowds over Linhardt, snatching him by the wrists and dragging his arms above his head in order to bare him open. He knocks aside his spectacles with the move, which earns him a bemused huff, but he quiets Linhardt’s protests by sucking the lobe of one of his ears between his teeth and biting down.

“ _Ah_ ,” Linhardt gasps. Felix sneaks a knee between his legs and drags his tongue along his thrumming pulse, savoring the salt on his skin while Linhardt arches against the solid satisfaction of his thigh. Felix shifts his grip to trap both of Linhardt’s wrists in a cross beneath one hand, freeing the other one to fumble with the buttons of his collar. His body feels as hot as the fire even through the thick folds of his robes. Felix rips at them with a clumsy grip, slipping his fingers over the first hint of his skin. He follows a greedy path across the slope of his chest and down the taper of his waist.

“Let me touch you,” Linhardt breathes. The bald-faced wanting in his voice shocks Felix’s grip loose. Linhardt darts free from him and slips his hands to Felix’s fly, making quick work of the laces while bowing forward to kiss him again.

“You,” Felix says into the hot space between their lips, punctuating each other word with another hungry swipe of his tongue, “you’re so fucking _strange_.”

Linhardt laughs into his mouth. The sound turns into a gasp when Felix breaks free and grasps him by the hips. Felix yanks him forward, tipping him against the square of his shoulders while he pulls his trousers to his knees.

“And what should I call _you_?” Linhardt asks breathily, looking at him over the bridge of his nose and around the cocked angle of his tangled legs. Felix huffs and shakes his head at the question. Hell if he knows. He gives Linhardt’s pants another hard tug and finally drags them over his ankles. Linhardt’s head tips backwards when Felix hikes him higher upwards by the hips, bracing him in a crumpled vee as he crouches over him and tosses his legs over his shoulders.

“Insatiable,” Linhardt decides aloud for the both of them, moaning when Felix sinks his teeth into his thigh. Felix swipes his tongue over the pink half-moons he’s left behind before tracing upwards to the sensitive skin in the crux between Linhardt’s legs. The soft pillow of his ass yields under his grip; makes him dizzy.

“You like it like this?” Felix almost catches himself too late.

“Yes,” Linhardt pants, bracing against his elbows to peer up at Felix from between the awkward angle of his parted legs. “It doesn’t matter to me. Go on — _ah._ ”

The bonfire crackles and roars when Felix slips the point of his tongue inside him. The rest of Linhardt’s body feels too hot for it to be a coincidence. Felix sways agains the tightening vice of his legs, tracing the last few rungs of his spine as he flattens his tongue and teases Linhardt looser.

“Enough, enough,” Linhardt gasps breathlessly, bending forward at the waist to urge Felix towards him again. “Come here.”

A bead of saliva connects them for a moment longer until Felix complies, shoving Linhardt’s legs to the side to crawl above him. Linhardt loosens the laces at Felix’s collar and tugs at the sweat-damp fabric with enough conviction to convince Felix to draw it over his head himself. Linhardt’s fingers are already at his fly again by the time he’s tossed the shirt aside. He shivers at the touch of something cool and slick against his cock. Fucking Linhardt. He should have expected him to have some magical solution for _that_.

“Are you sure,” Felix gasps, shuddering when Linhardt tightens his grip and begins to stroke him more earnestly.

“You aren’t the first man I’ve slept with,” Linhardt reassures him. “Do it. Let me feel you.”

Felix pulls back before he loses himself entirely. Linhardt stares back at him with dark-blown eyes. His hair is loose and scattered across the grass like silk, his robes tangled and hiked high into a clutter below his chin. Felix’s certain now that he’s something other than human, but rather some epicene superior made to lure fools like Felix into inescapable places — into dark and doom. The bonfire shifts from blue into a warm red that casts them both with an intimate glow. It makes it easier for Felix to forget that they’re both three-quarters naked in a pasture not so far away from the main road.

And it feels good: to want, to satisfy, to not be alone for a while. 

“Fine,” Felix sighs. “Gods. Look at you.”

Linhardt grins dangerously and turns shoulder-over-shoulder, bending upwards on his knees with a hand busied with spreading himself open. Felix grows lightheaded from the sight of how his gloved fingers trail something wet and glimmering on his skin.

“Fuck,” he breathes. He hears Linhardt snicker, which makes a competitive spark kindle to life in his chest. Shifting on his knees to match his partner’s new height, he gives himself a lazy stroke and shudders from the enduring slickness of Linhardt’s lewd magic trick.

“Felix,” Linhardt moans impatiently. Felix grips the base of his cock and presses the head inside him more briskly than he’d intended, riled by the sultry sway of Linhardt’s ass and the way he insists on mocking him like he’s some — _fuck_ — some...

“Shit,” Felix groans, reeling from the velvety vice of Linhardt’s body as he slips deeper. Linhardt moans as well, his voice pitched higher and reedier in duet with Felix’s low sigh. Felix’s thoughts melt away into a molten, primitive mess. He waits until he’s pressed flush against Linhardt’s sticky body before he tears at his sleeves, tumbling him side-to-side as he finishes undressing him. It’ll ruin the clothes, he’s sure — expensive, well-made things. He wants to toss them into the fire. Maybe he even wants to follow after.

“Come on,” Linhardt whines, writhing against Felix’s stilled hips. “Don’t stop.”

Felix grips him firmly by the waist and keeps him grounded while he slowly drags backwards, utterly bewitched by the ruddy flush of his cock against Linhardt’s pale body. Linhardt is good at getting fucked. He shifts into a better angle, teasing Felix forward again and urging him into a quicker pace. Felix gives him what he wants. Linhardt moans with every thrust, each one more potent than a drag from his flask in filling Felix with drunken wanting. His hands stray from Linhardt’s hips to track covetously along his body. He kneads dark spots into Linhardt’s thighs; presses him into the fragrant spring grass with the flat of his palm against the nape of his neck; slips a hand beneath them both to stroke the smooth heat of his cock until Linhardt’s gasps turn into cries.

At some point Felix’s hair slips free from its binding to spill across his shoulders. The world blurs into a smeared mosaic of the dark curtain swaying around his face, and the flushed glimpses of Linhardt peeking at him wantonly over his shoulder, and the bonfire’s glimmering inferno. Finally Linhardt comes, dripping hot over Felix’s fingers, and Felix can only manage three more stuttering thrusts before Linhardt’s tight heat coaxes him over the edge as well.

He isn’t surprised that the bonfire suddenly quiets into a pile of embers just as he pulls out and slumps exhausted at Linhardt’s side. For a moment they’re both silent. Felix realizes that they’ve blurred the lines between them in a dozen different irreversible ways. They’re not so different, now: just two scarred men with long, tangled hair, sweaty and smeared with dirt and come and sprigs of grass torn from the earth. Shit. And they’d both been heroes, once. Edelgard had even given him a fucking _medal_. Look at them now. All he can do is laugh, and so he does, low and breathy, his eyes blurring from the effort as he stares upwards into the glitter of the stars.

He hears Linhardt laugh, too. It’s a little more drowsy than his version, a little quieter, but it’s just as kind. Felix listens to it for awhile before he lets himself drift off. It’s stupid to sleep like that, naked and vulnerable next to a dying fire, but somehow he knows that they’ll be alright.

* * *

“Welcome to the Imperial Crestology Institute, Lord Fraldarius.” 

“Don’t call me that,” Felix growls.

“Sir,” the poor attendant corrects quickly, bowing, although he doesn’t have to, or at least not for a second time. Once was too much. Not that he knows it, the poor bastard, but damn them all if Felix isn’t getting tired of looking at the tops of people’s heads. And he isn’t so keen about this whole predicament, just to be clear. He might even admit that he’d enjoyed the last leg of his and Linhardt’s journey, long-drawn and meandering as it’d been, but he’d certainly not appreciated being abandoned by the fickle mage as soon as they’d breached the Institute’s shiny new walls. When he’d learned that Minister-fucking- _Vestra_ was scheduled to meet them in time for lunch, Felix had decided that he’d very well climb up those walls and jump off himself.

Which he hadn’t done, of course, but being suddenly accosted by this offensively polite young man seems nearly as terrible as breaking his legs against the Institute marble plaza.

“Sir,” the attendant tries again, fiddling with the well-ironed cuffs of his grey-and-red uniform, “sir Fraldarius—”

“Not that either,” Felix sighs. Mustering what little remains of his good nature, he crosses his arms and stares daggers at him instead of simply turning and leaving him behind. The young man melts into his collar and manages to undo one of the buttons on his sleeves with a fidgeting thumb.

“S-sir,” he manages, “if you would allow me to show you to your rooms—”

“What?”

“— so that you may refresh yourself in anticipation for your lunch with Minister Vestra and Master Hevring?”

_Master Hevring_. How the hell had Linhardt convinced them to call him _that_? At least it seems to suggest that they can be taught to forget about _Fraldarius_ , too, and maybe even _lord_. Felix sighs. Still, better to make a escape to some space behind a locked door, which he can only imagine that these alleged rooms must include. He’d been trying to do the same earlier, before he’d heard the echo of Hubert’s slithering voice down one of the institute’s endless halls, saying something about _congratulations_ and _convincing him_ , which Felix had a sinking feeling had something to do with him (Felix being a _him_ , of course, and a man generally requiring a good deal of negotiation to do much of anything at all).

“Go on, then,” he relents, nodding down the corridor. The attendant bows for a third superfluous time before turning neatly on his heel in order to lead Felix in the opposite direction. _Shit_. So maybe he really would’ve gotten himself lost all on his lonesome.

The attendant guides him up a set of spiraling stairs and past a set of rooms filled with burbling mages all enthralled by identical piles of books and empty glass vials. He’ll probably never understand men like them, although he supposes that they’d say the same thing about him after watching him spend an afternoon swinging a sword at a wooden dummy. Maybe that’s what it means to grow older: admitting that they’re all a bit strange.

“Sir,” the attendant echoes. He folds forward before reaching for a door. It opens into an airy room benefitting from its place on the top floor. Felix steps inside and admires the view of Kleiman’s craggy hills outside the generously proportioned windows. He grunts, which the attendant smartly interprets as a farewell address. Once alone, Felix makes a further inspection of the guest quarters to which he will apparently be temporarily assigned.

They’re odd, just like everything else in the sprawling Institute. The main room is dominated by a large bed where any proper noble house would have instead offered a benign reception space. That takes second priority in a smaller room branched to the right, although it’s currently lacking any seating and boasts only an ugly yellow rug to call its own. The third room is a washroom, and primarily a celebration of the strange devices that Linhardt’s retinue had invented in recent years in order to coax water upwards against the drag of the air. Felix eyes all of the shiny porcelain with a measured stare. Even he isn’t stubborn enough to not admit that he appreciates the finer arts of a proper bath.

Back in the main room again, he approaches a large wardrobe with a careful step. The doors open without a creak to display a full collection of shirts and slacks. There are tall boots neatly folded below, and even a traveling cloak dyed a familiar shade of the teal. That makes him frown. Later he convinces himself that that damned cloak is why he doesn’t hear the rustling lump hidden beneath the bed’s blankets until it yawns. 

“It’s you,” Linhardt observes sleepily, all mussed hair and bleary eyes. He yawns again and rubs at his nose. “Finally. I thought you might have fallen off the mount.”

“You had your people fetch me to your _bed_?” Felix scoffs, bemused. That explains why the room’s so nice, although he’d never taken Linhardt for a man interested in traveling cloaks after being privy to so many of his stupid robes.

“Well, yes, of course. That’s what they’re here for,” Linhardt replies. He flops backwards into the pillows again, sighing blissfully from the quiet crumple of the down inside.

“I’m not some on-call courtesan,” Felix replies, although the contention lacks the venom to really make it stick. He shuts the wardrobe and makes a slow approach towards the bed.

“Goodness,” Linhardt snorts. “How terrible you’d be. You have the skill, of course, but positively none of the bedside manner.”

Felix doesn’t humor that one with a response. It doesn’t seem to bother Linhardt, who burrows deeper into the pillow and peeks at him over the curve of his arm.

“Do you like it?”

“What? The Institute? It’s obscene. No wonder it took so many years to build,” Felix replies, and to the amused glitter in Linhardt’s eyes. “What do you need all of this space for?”

“Heaven knows,” Linhardt replies in pleased agreement. “But impressive, don’t you think? Hubert’s approved every blueprint.” He yawns again. “Every penny. After awhile I had no choice but to see how deep the well of his benevolence. _Very deep_ is the consensus, as we all can see. Whoever knew he was such a lover of the academic arts.”

Linhardt peels back a collection of blankets in order to pat welcomingly at the empty spot beside him. Felix eyes the naked slip of his chest, but doesn’t give him the satisfaction of looking openly intrigued. Linhardt grins, having grown accustomed to Felix’s limited selection of moods.

“No,” Linhardt continues drowsily, “that isn’t what I asked before. You like your rooms?”

“ _Mine_?”

“Yes,” Linhardt purrs. He kicks a blanketed toe towards the sitting room at the far corner. “Do you like what I’ve done with the salon? I figured that you’d best like to greet your guests standing up.”

“What the hell am I going to do with _rooms_?”

“Sleep in them,” Linhardt laughs. “What a scene you’d make bathing in the fountains. Is that what you’ve been doing when I’m not there to stop you?”

“ _Sleep in them_ ,” Felix repeats incredulously. “How long do you expect me to stay here?”

Linhardt looks up at him again. For just a moment Felix sees the face he generally keeps hidden: a little sad, a little worn, uneasy, unsure. It flickers back to his usual coy smirk just as quickly as it appears. All the same it has an effect on Felix, intended or otherwise. He tries to counter it with the roll of his eyes, although they both must know it’s insincere.

“Do you have pressing matters elsewhere?” Linhardt teases. He rubs at his eyes and stretches his arms over his head, drawing out his words in order to properly rile Felix, as is his usual preference. “Here is my proposal for you. We mean to do important work here. No doubt some stern, dark, miserable swordsmen will hunt us out, mistaking us for simple alchemists making gold out of pig shit for them to steal. There seems no better man than you to keep us safe from them.”

Felix glances at the windows again. Kleiman’s cliffs seem plenty steep enough to deter most treasure hunters.

“Is that right?” he asks dryly “You as generous with your money as Hubert?”

“Goodness, no. I’m positively a pauper.” 

Felix laughs and shakes his head. What a raw fucking deal. What’s he supposed to do, play nursemaid to a gaggle of yellow-bellied researchers, and hope that they don’t just blow the whole place to hell? And what is he going to do in _Kleiman_? He doesn’t know a fucking thing about the place, other than the fact that the locals give them dirty looks that they most certainly deserve — or did, until Felix realized that Linhardt’s employed most all of them in a move that must have driven his counterparts in Enbarr absolutely mad. The damned bastard has already done more to repair Fodlanese-Duscurian relations than any well-intentioned diplomat, and most likely by mistake. 

In any case, it’s a bad idea. Precisely the sort of thing that Felix has been smart enough to keep away from for every day of his godsforsaken life. Obligation. Compromise. Shit, maybe even _sacrifice_. And what’s he going to get in return? Linhardt hiding in his bed in the middle of the day, and him playing beleaguered knight when the rest of the abandoned Institute comes knocking down their door?

Linhardt grins at him like a fishmonger’s cat and gives the bed another welcoming pat. Felix doesn’t give him an answer, not even when he sighs and begins to fiddle with his buttons. Despite his better judgment, he also doesn’t run.


End file.
